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Product: Brain Editor Professional Developer: Twinno Reviewer: John Hattan Posted: February 10, 2005 Rating: Discuss this review

After twenty years of products ranging from moderate successes to complete failures, the Eclipse project and the 900-pound gorilla that is Microsoft finally made the biggest strides towards the often-theorized-but-never-developed "universal IDE". Given a proper Eclipse extension or a language that understands .NET, you can now move from language to language without having to teach yourself a different editor and debugger every time.

This technique, however, doesn't work with most of the new game-oriented scripting environments, like Torque, DarkBasic, Blitz, etc. Most being fairly new to the scene and run by new players, they're suffering the same problems that Microsoft and Borland suffered in the 80's and 90's, namely that they're following their own standards for editing and compiling. While the competition does and has fostered the creation of superior development tools, you do end up with a confusing mix of editors, and it's hard to get comfortable with a particular editor. There are always the uber-editors like SlickEdit or MultiEdit, but they're expensive and you'll have to handle things like browsing and dealing with compiler errors on your own.

Enter Twinno's Brain Editor Professional. It's a smart programmer's text editor that recognizes 3D Rad, 3D GameStudio, Torque, DarkBASIC and Blitz3D. And, since a picture's worth a thousand words when reviewing editors, here's Brain Editor Pro.

Brain Editor Pro editing some TorqueScript

Now this thing's downright classy for a game-related tool. The interface is matter-of-fact and easy to follow. Tooltips are everywhere for any toolbar icons that you don't recognize immediately. If you're familiar with any of the Microsoft .NET tools, you'll feel right at home with Brain Editor Pro. The panel on the left shows all of your browse information. It's a bit hard to see from the reduced screenshots, but I've got a nice little tree of functions, variables, packages, and datablocks (as they apply to TorqueScript). The tabs under the panel allow you to view your entire project or a file-browser. The panel across the bottom has command-help (Brain Editor Pro is smart enough to find the help for the script you're using), syntax results, output and variable-watch windows. Now let's see what Brain Editor Pro looks like if you're editing a different script.

Brain Editor Pro editing some Blitz3D code

Note that the editor's structure looks a little different to accommodate Blitz3D's BASIC-ish script as opposed to Torque's C-ish script. Also note that the left panel now shows information that's germane to Blitz3D, specifically Functions, Arrays, Consts, Globals, and Types. Brain Editor Pro's browser is quite clever and does a superb job of figuring out what it's editing, popping up browse information that best suits it. That also extends to things like function parameter completion. Having used tools that do a mediocre job at function parameter completion (e.g. Flash MX 2004), you really notice when a product "does it right".

As for the rest of the editor's functionality, you should find yourself right at home if you're familiar with the Microsoft tools. Some dialog boxes, like find-and-replace, are virtual duplicates of the ones you use with the MS Visual tools. And that's a good thing, because they're familiar and they work. Big kudos to the Brain Editor Pro folks for going with what works rather than what's clever. I felt instantly familiar with the product.

Brain Editor Pro has its own rudimentary project capabilities. You have the ability to create, add files to, and browse projects just like the aforementioned familiar IDEs of the past. You can stuff everything into your project, from source code to resource files to images. You don't have the ability to edit binary files internally (like Visual C++'s built-in icon editor), but if you've got your registry set up to launch apps on an extension's double-click, you'll launch the tool from within Brain Editor Pro. For example, double-clicking on a .jpeg file in one of my projects launches Paint Shop Pro where I can make changes to the jpeg file.

Speed and stability are excellent despite one minor problem I had initially. Upon installing the program and running for the first time, I was presented with toolbars that looked something like burned mud. The icons were unreadable and drooled all over the place as I moused over them. A quick email to tech support confirmed that Brain Editor Pro's toolbars have trouble with nonstandard Windows XP themes. The solution was to either turn off the themes (not gonna happen) or to uncheck the "Office 2003 Look" checkbox in the configuration (no problem). After restarting the editor, the toolbars looked just fine. Apart from quick email tech support, Brain Editor Pro has tech support available in their online forum.

The big unanswered question thus far is "why should I buy a third-party editor if already has one built-in?" The following answers come to mind.

• At least one of the tools above (Torque) doesn't have an IDE and requires you to provide your own editor, so you might as well own one that understands your target script.
• The editors in all of the above tools are an afterthought. These are companies that are primarily makers of game engines, and rightly so.
• If you're evaluating multiple tools or intend to use more than one of the above game environments, Brain Editor Pro will lower the learning curve by giving you an editor that understands how your fingers work.
• If you're already familiar with any of the Microsoft Visual Tools, from Visual C++ 2 all the way up to Visual Studio.NET, you'll have the editor figured out practically before you start.

Given the very reasonable price of Brain Editor Professional ($24.95 single copy or $59 for a site-license), the decision's really a no-brainer.